reel time: ethnography and the historical ontology...

Reel time: ethnography and thehistorical ontology of the cinematicimage

ANAND PANDIAN

This essay seeks to make a case for the conceptual significance ofethnographic attention to filmmaking practice. Relying upon fieldwork onlocation with a contemporary south Indian film director, I draw attentionto three domains of temporal experience through which cinematic imagesgain their form – perception, action and affection. I do not argue that suchattention will somehow complete or correct the picture we may have of anempirical situation – film production – that remains simply neglected ormisunderstood. Instead, I hope to show that there are unresolved problemswith respect to cinematic experience that are most effectively confrontedthrough an ethnographic examination of such practices. These problemshave most centrally to do with time: the apparent contradiction betweenfilm’s static and discontinuous frames, and the continuous flux of realityto which they attest. This essay addresses itself to this persistent impasseby undertaking a ‘historical ontology’ of cinematic images: by attending,that is, to the accidents, eruptions and limits of circumstance throughwhich films are invested with determinate form. Cinema can give us theexperience of time in its fluxion only because it is made in such a time.What is expressed both by cinema and by the conditions of its emergence,in other words, is the creative potential of temporal duration. I thereforeseek less to locate or contextualize a particular practice of filmmaking thanto elicit its temporal textures of perception and action, thought andsensation, chance and intention.

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Cinema has long been seen to express a paradoxical relationship totime. In the era of cinema’s inception in the West, Mary Anne Doanehas observed, capitalist modernity rendered time palpable in twocontradictory ways: through its standardization and abstraction inproliferating clocks, schedules, tables, and routines, but also through itscelebration as a field for the appearance of the contingent, accidental,and unexpected.1 ‘Time’s reality in the cinema’ is therefore twofold,Doane argues: ‘both that of continuity and rupture’.2 On the one hand,from its early portrayal of ‘actualities’ onward, cinema has continuallyshown and assured us that ‘Something is happening’.3 But on the otherhand, running films have done so only by hiding from us what is reallyhappening onscreen: the necessary and relentless fixity and stillnessaccompanying each shift from static frame to frame. With thisdistinction between appearance and reality, Doane’s argument impliesthat there is something deeply ideological in the association of cinemawith temporal contingency in modern times: ‘In the face of theabstraction and rationalization of time, chance and the contingent aregiven the crucial ideological role of representing an outside, ofsuggesting that time is still allied with the free and indeterminable’.4

Cinematic time may indeed often be the object and context of suchideological operations, and such operations in and through time mayindeed constitute familiar subjects of experience. An essential questionnevertheless remains: is the relationship between cinema, time andfreedom no more than a chapter in the history of ideology?

Another tradition in studies of the cinema has taken these three termsinstead as elements of an ontology of the image and its capacities. AndreBazin, Gilles Deleuze and others have argued that the cinematic mediumis uniquely poised to convey the flux of time within which living thingsemerge, exist and evolve, its universe of moving images potentiallyenabling a perception of time itself as pure becoming.5 ‘The cinemamakes a molding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makesan imprint of the duration of the object’,6 Bazin famously wrote, forexample, drawing upon Henri Bergson’s influential early twentieth-century distinctions between the creative flux of experience and thespatialized abstraction of time. Each of ‘the moments of our life… is akind of creation’, Bergson had argued.7 Time could not be taken asincidental to the process of creative emergence, as an empty intervalwhose length could be measured independent of what was being madewithin it. Rather, he suggested, ‘the time taken up by the invention is onewith the invention itself’.8

It is well known that Bergson had explicitly opposed these observationsconcerning durative time to the image of the early ‘cinematographic’apparatus unrolling discrete and measured instants with no more than theillusion of continuity.9 Meanwhile, recent work in film studies has alsocharacterized Bergson’s interest in time and freedom itself as a symptomof time horizons prevailing in the urban modernity of nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century Europe.10 How then might we think through the

1 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergenceof Cinematic Time: Modernity,Contingency, the Archive(Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2002).

2 Mary Ann Doane, ‘(De)realizingcinematic time’, in Atom Egoyan

and Ian Balfour (eds), Subtitles: onthe Foreignness of Film (Boston,

MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 272.3 Ibid., p. 281.

4 Doane, The Emergence ofCinematic Time, p. 230.

5 See Paola Marrati, Gilles Deleuze:Cinema and Philosophy (Baltimore,MD: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 2008).

6 André Bazin, ‘The ontology of the

photographic image’, in What isCinema, Volume I, trans. Hugh Gray(Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1967), p. 97.

7 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution(New York, NY: Cosimo Classics,2005), p. 9.

8 Ibid., p. 370.

9 Ibid., pp. 330–43.

10 See, for example, Bliss Chua Lim,

Translating Time: Cinema, theFantastic, and Temporal Critique(Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2009).

194 Screen 52:2 Summer 2011 . Anand Pandian . Reel time


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relationship between the ‘historical’ and the ‘ontological’ – to use a pair ofterms usefully put forward recently by Bliss Cua Lim – in the cinematicconveyance of time?11

What I pursue in this essay is less a juxtaposition of the historical andthe ontological as disjunctive problems and domains and more aninterweaving of these terms, through a pursuit of what might be called the‘historical ontology’ of cinematic images. I borrow this method fromMichel Foucault, who described its concern in the following manner: ‘Inwhat is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place isoccupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitraryconstraints?’12 While Foucault was concerned here with the ethicalpractices through which the exercise of selfhood may be taken up as apursuit of freedom, I suggest that a similar orientation may guide ourenquiries into the temporal life and death of the cinematic image.13 Tograpple most effectively with the paradox of cinema as ‘changemummified’ – in Bazin’s memorable phrase – we may turn our attentionfrom the afterlife of mummified images, so to speak, to the living historyof their mummification.14 With this image of a living history, I aim todraw attention to the singular and concrete circumstances through which,as anthropologist Kathleen Stewart puts it, ‘things turn out to be not whatyou thought they were’ – a mode of attending to the quotidian nature ofthings as a matter of ongoing and incessant transformation.15

Historical ontology seeks such difference in the fine grain of intimateexperience: in the ethical, affective and aesthetic texture of relations withoneself and others. The approach I pursue here therefore deviates from thefocus on the productive force of various social, cultural, political andeconomic structures in many studies of cinematic creation.16 The figure ofthe filmmaker as auteur may now appear as an artefact of modernistconvention, humanist nostalgia or clever marketing on the part of studioexecutives and distributors. But while the making of film may no longerseem to reflect ineffable genius – unless one is concerned with the ‘geniusof the system’17 – the question of newness and its cinematic elaborationremains a problem worthy of confrontation.When acts of filmmaking are presented as the outgrowth of structural

forces, material conditions or craft conventions, the fact of creation itself isthreatened with occlusion: not whether there is in fact something newabout a particular film or filmmaker, but how – given that the creation ofsome form, feeling or mode of life is the inescapable concomitant of anyexercise of perception and action – such newness comes to appear in themidst of a directed process of production. It is with an eye to suchemergence that I follow a specifically ethnographic endeavour inhistorico-ontological work, attending to the singular practices,unanticipated circumstances and constitutive accidents through whichfilm images gain their form.18

Recent anthropological work on creativity has refocused attention onprocesses of improvization inhering in ‘the onward propulsion of life’,through which ‘the mind’s creativity is inseparable from that of the total

11 Ibid., pp. 43–95.

12 Michel Foucault, ‘What isenlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow

(ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth(New York, NY: New Press, 1997),

p. 315.13 On the historical ontology of the

ethical self in south India, see my

‘Interior horizons: an ethical space

of selfhood in South India’, Journalof the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute, vol. 16, no. 1(2010), pp. 64–83. For an

ethnography of self-constitutionamong reality video cameramen,

see Vicki Mayer, ‘Guys gone wild?

Soft-core video professionalism

and new realities in televisionproduction’, Cinema Journal, vol.47, no. 2 (2008), pp. 97–116.

14 Bazin, ‘The ontology of the

photographic image’, p. 97.15 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects

(Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2007), p. 106.

16 For a useful overview, see JanetStaiger, ‘Authorship approaches’,

in David Gerstner and Janet Staiger

(eds), Authorship and Film(New York, NY: Routledge, 2003).

17 André Bazin, ‘De la politique des

auteurs’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.),

Auteurs and Authorship: a FilmReader (London: Blackwell, 2008).

18 See Hortense Powdermaker’s

groundbreaking Hollywood: theDream Factory (New York, NY: Arno

Press, 1950); John T. Caldwell,

Production Culture: IndustrialReflexivity and Critical Practice inFilm and Television (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2008); Vicki

Mayer, John Caldwell, andMiranda

Banks (eds), Production Studies:Cultural Studies of MediaIndustries (New York, NY:

Routledge, 2009; Tejaswini Ganti,

Producing Bollywood (Durham, NC:Duke University Press,

forthcoming).



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matrix of relations in which it is embedded and into which it extends’.19 Inwhat follows, I hope to show that ethnographic fieldwork with filmmakersin the act of filmmaking offers an especially effective means of engagingthe emergence of cinema in an open-ended durative time: the accidentalhappening of cinema is best grasped, that is, through the incidentalhappening of ethnographic encounter.20

Situating oneself within the time and space of production allows for thedeepest exposure to the temporal duration of filmic creation; to theunpredictable yet effective interplay of multiple elements, accidentsand intentions traversing any clear line that may be drawn between themakers of film and the milieu in which their making takes place. It isthrough a practice of ethnographic immersion in and with the emergenceof cinema, in other words, that the present comes to appear most clearlyand subtly as a creative temporal horizon.21What I intend to convey in thisessay are the possibilities of ethnographic method as a means ofconfronting the temporal genesis and life of the cinematic image. Ratherthan taking anthropology as necessarily committed to the anachronisticand allochronic – a reputation still widely borne by the discipline – Iexplore cinematic practices of emergence as essential elements of whathas been described more recently as an ‘anthropology of thecontemporary’.22

It is worth marking at the outset, however, that the argumentsdeveloped here also bear a certain significance for contemporary concernsin film philosophy – most specifically in relation to the pair of bookswritten on the cinema by Deleuze.23 In the same way that Deleuze soughtto reveal Bergsonian potentials in the cinematic image that had beenneglected by Bergson himself, I hope here to convey a series ofBergsonian potentials in the process of filmmaking neglected in turn byDeleuze. Consider the following passage that appears towards the end ofCinema 2: ‘The great cinema authors are like the great painters or the greatmusicians: it is they who talk best about what they do. But, in talking, theybecome something else, they become philosophers or theoreticians.’24 Inmodern cinema’s expression of time, Deleuze found a means of thinkingthrough the emergent potential of thought itself. As D. N. Rodowickelaborates: ‘for Deleuze, the cinema of time produces an image of thoughtas a non-totalizable process and a sense of history as unpredictablechange’.25 There is a close relationship here between the becoming-otherwise of thought and the potential for becoming-otherwise borne bythe cinematic image of time. At stake for Deleuze in both of theseinstances is the substitution of one kind of formula for another: from‘Ego= Ego’ as a law of identity to ‘I is another’ as a process of creativeand emergent displacement.26 But in what ways might it matter that thatthis argument is made most explicitly in Cinema 2 in relation to the workof an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, Jean Rouch?

What is most intriguing about Deleuze’s engagement with Rouch is itsblurring of the line between the filmic and the profilmic. ‘If the real-fictionalalternative is so completely surpassed it is because the camera, instead of

19 Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam,

‘Creativity and culturalimprovisation: an introduction’, in

Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam

(eds), Creativity and CulturalImprovisation (Oxford: Berg,2007), pp. 3, 9.

20 On ethnography as encounter, see

John Borneman and Abdellah

Hammoudi (eds), Being There: theFieldwork Encounter and theMaking of Truth (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press,

2009).

21 On the optative horizons ofanthropological imagination, see

Vincent Crapanzano, ImaginativeHorizons: an Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 2004).

22 See Paul Rabinow, George Marcus,

James Faubion and Tobias Rees,

Designs for an Anthropology of theContemporary (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2008).

23 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: theMovement-Image (Minneapolis,MN: University of Minnesota Press,

1986) and Cinema 2: the Time-Image (Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press,1989).

24 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 280.

25 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’sTime Machine (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1997), p. 17.




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marking out a fictional or real present, constantly reattaches the character tothe before and after which constitute a direct time-image’, he writes,proposing the continual becoming of character and filmmaker alike.27

Onemight argue that this contamination of the filmic by the profilmic– here,the image by what precedes and succeeds it – is one of the central concernsof Deleuze’s work on the cinema. After all, it is precisely this that the time-image in cinema, likeBergson’s philosophy, helps us to see: ‘the universe ascinema in itself, a metacinema’.28 But because Deleuze relies entirely uponfirst-person narratives, critical reviews and his own film readings to elicitthis potential from cinema, it would appear that he is forced to fall back uponthe authority of those ‘who talk best about what they do’: the avant-gardefilms and discourse of a few ‘great cinema authors’. The formula ‘Ego=Ego’ surreptitiously returns through the back door.This essay is motivated by a similar interest in the creative potential of

‘I is another’ – it is no coincidence that Claude Levi-Strauss borrowedprecisely the same formula from Rimbaud in order to characterize thework of anthropology.29 However, a more fully ethnographic encounterwith the making of film offers a compelling means of confronting not onlythe creative emergence of cinema in time, but also the potential of cinemato reveal time itself as a flow of creative emergence. Bergson haddescribed the experience of intuition – a vision of reality itself as‘unceasing duration, the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty’ – as essentialto the work of any artist.30 I hope to convey the significance of suchperception not only for the making of cinema but also for our thought ofwhat it makes possible. What might we come to see as we traverse thezone of indistinction between the filmic and profilmic? What if thepractice of filmmaking itself – irrespective of the distinctiveness or statusof its authors – expressed not the purity of its makers’ intentions butinstead the immanent potential of the situations in which these imagesarise? Does the cinema’s revelation of time in its flux depend upon theimmersion of its makers in the experience of such a time themselves? It iswith these questions in mind that I turn now to the temporal thought andpractice of one south Indian film director.31

The character Sasha first appears in the Tamil film Billa (Vishnu Vardhan,2007) as a figure gliding across the screen with stylized grace. Action isessential to this gangster film set in contemporary Kuala Lumpur, andwithin a few minutes of Sasha’s first appearance we see that she intendsone act in particular: murdering the don after whom the film itself isnamed. In the fluid movement of acting bodies, camera angles andsoundtrack rhythms leading up to her murder attempt, however, onesequence stands out for the languid quality of its pacing: the camera slowsfor a series of shots that reveal first a bundle of yellow flowers carefullylaid onto two grey marble slabs, then the wide graveyard where these slabsare found, then the faces commemorated by these graves, and finally thefigure of Sasha standing before them. Two brief flashbacks in black

27 Ibid., p. 152.


29 Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, founder of the

sciences of man’, StructuralAnthropology, Volume II (London:Allen Lane, 1976), pp. 33–43.

30 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind:an Introduction to Metaphysics(New York. NY: Dover, 2007), p. 7.

31 This essay arises from a larger

project concerning the productive

experience of producers, directors,actors and actresses,

cinematographers, editors, art and

music directors and other film

technicians in Tamil cinema. WhileI focus here on the milieu of

directing on location, other

directorial practices such as

scripting, location scouting,casting, editing and scoring are

engaged elsewhere.



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and white disclose the relationship between the heroine and the deadpair – both slain by the gangster Billa – and as our gaze returns to theimage of Sasha before the marbled graves, we see these slabs and theirflower bundles reflected in the dark of her mirrored sunglasses. As thecamera closes in on Sasha’s face, the sounds of recollected laughtergradually gain a tinny echo, as if cast from within a deep well. The depthsthat we find reflected in her mirrored frames are temporal rather thanspatial, redoubling her present with living reverberations of the past. It isin the lingering depths of this temporal span that we find this characterbecoming something different: a would-be assassin bent on revenge. Buthow did this cinematic image of a creative time itself emerge?

A review article published in The Hindu newspaper identified Billadirector Vishnu Vardhan as one among a number of young directorsmaking a ‘new wave’ in Tamil film by fusing ‘the energy andentertainment of a mainstream film…with the complexity and sensitivityof an art film’.32 Billa was one of two films directed by Vishnu Vardhanwhose shooting I encountered in the summers of 2007 and 2008 duringfive weeks of ethnographic fieldwork. Striking out as an independentfilmmaker in 2003, Vishnu told me, the first question he found himselfconfronting was ‘What am I?’ He often spoke to me of filmmaking as ameans of personal expression: ‘it’s a medium, it’s a platform, it’s like astage, you come up and say what you want’. In the many conversationsthat we had on breaks between shots, he would describe what had justhappened in the first person, as though the mass of bodies, cables, propsand tools at work in these situations had been orchestrated as a means ofrealizing his own personal intentions; as he once said, ‘everything isfrom your own system’. And yet, at the same time, Vishnu also admittedthat he had a ‘problem’ with such words themselves: he often did notknow what he was saying, or where these words would lead as he spokethem. In the same way, in working with Vishnu I saw that the unfolding ofhis work in time also routinely exceeded his intentions, an excess that wasnot incidental but rather essential to the very mode of his directing.

The kernel of this essay appeared suddenly in the form of a three-minute exchange during the shooting of the graveyard sequence describedabove, an exchange about time that closely anticipated – in a way thatI could not have foreseen – the very experience of time put forward by thecinematic scene itself. The shots of Sasha mourning before a pair ofgravestones were composed on a humid summer’s day in Kuala Lumpurin June 2007. Nearly six hours were spent that day at a mosquito-riddengraveyard on the outskirts of the city, staging, framing and exposingthese shots. Cameraman, art director, assistants and crew worked hourafter hour to shift cranes, tracks and cameras, arrange lights, lay outelectrical lines, and touch up the colour and texture of the gravesthemselves, while Vishnu paid close attention to the look of thegravestones and the layout of the frames within the cameraman’sviewfinder (figure 1). Here, as was usually the case on Vishnu’s shoots,individual shots were blocked and composed on the spot, each leading

32 Pradeep Sebastian, ‘Beyond old

Kollywood’, The Hindu Magazine,13 January 2008.



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into the next through the rhythms of anticipation and satisfaction,enthusiasm and discontent. Meanwhile, it was my fourth day in KualaLumpur, and I was struggling with the swarms of mosquitoes and theheavy afternoon heat. As the cameraman coordinated the setup of one ofthese shots, I asked Vishnu how he coped with the enormous amount oftime and struggle it took to create what would amount to no more than afew seconds of the film. ‘It’s simple’, he replied. ‘I’m traveling in reeltime.’I was startled by this evocation of a temporal span other than the ‘real’

time we were apparently sharing in our conversation, and asked him whathe meant. He replied that he was always in reel time, whether or not he wasshooting, even when he was asleep. Inhabiting this other time, he had notfelt at all the long and difficult passage of hours that I had experienced:‘Those four seconds of shots, it is that moment that you’re living in. Thatmoment. By the time it’s lunch break, fuck! Lunch break and by the timeyou go, and fuck! It’s evening already. You travel in that thing actually.You won’t know actually that the time is just flying.’Vishnu admitted that he had to make it a habit of just looking at his

watch to know the actual time. He admitted too that his experience of ‘reeltime’ posed certain challenges in the way that he encountered and engagedother people: ‘When I am talking, even when I am talking to my ADs[Assistant Directors] also, suddenly I will go somewhere else. I won’tknow where I am.’ This living in a different time and space seemedessential to his work as a director: ‘I have to be there. It’s anotherexperience when you just.…When you are just there. You are there inthat space. You are just looking around, no? Fuck! This is what I am goingto shoot. And this is what is going to be in the film. Capturing thatmoment, no?’ To travel in reel time was to allow one’s own experience toassume the tangible qualities conveyed by the physical medium of thefilm reel, to lose oneself to the time and space being conjured onscreen.Here was a filmmaker describing his own experience of Bergsonianduration.While shooting film, Vishnu had no choice but to work within multiple

and layered temporal horizons: the rational abstractions of clock schedulesand hourly shifts in relation to which labour and equipment contracts wereorganized; the sacred time of auspicious and inauspicious momentsaround which the inception and conclusion of work was oriented; theinexorable passage of the sun through a productive milieu oriented largely

Fig. 1. Billa (Vishnu Vardhan, 2007)

graveyard scene: screenshot of

Sasha (Nayantara), and the director

observing the tracking camera.



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around the play of available light; and the time of repetition that animatedthe pursuit of adequate rehearsals and takes. But working with generousbacking from a London-based Tamil corporate entertainment house,Vishnu also had the freedom to engage these diverse horizons from thestandpoint of the cinematic reel time he was unraveling, a term that he andother filmmakers typically used to discuss the span of film – ‘two minutes,400 feet’ – it would take to present a particular shot or scene. What was atstake in his depiction of this unfurling time as a moment in which onecould lose oneself? What was it to ‘travel’ in such a time; to take, that is,the projected time of cinema as an open duration within which one couldmove and create as a living being?

We may find evidence here of modern cinema’s ongoing affair withcontingency, the attractive immediacy of the ‘moment’ in the midst of afleeting and ephemeral rush of experience.33Alternatively, one might seekout reverberations here of specifically Indian philosophies of time, thecontinued salience of insights presented in classical texts such as theYoga-Bhasya: ‘the whole universe undergoes change in a singlemoment’.34 Or, to resist attributing this temporal experience either to the‘modern’ as such, or to the persistence of vernacular cultural forms, onemight find here an instance of the more particular ‘now’ engaged by third-world filmmakers in a postcolonial milieu.35 Scholarship on Indian filmhas focused for the most part on the ideological constitution of nationaland postcolonial subjects through the operation of representationalnarratives, codes, structures and meanings. But I want to suggest that wemay do more with Vishnu’s experience of time than to establish itshistorical, geographic and cultural location or context.36 Like manycontemporary Indian directors, his self-described influences were globalin their scope, including figures as diverse as Akira Kurosawa, MartinScorsese, Guy Ritchie and a few ‘Korean’ filmmakers. If there was a‘culture’ of time at stake here, in other words, it might simply be that ofcontemporary filmmaking. To propose this possibility is also to suggestthat we may find broader textures of experience at work in Vishnu’s filmicthoughts and practices, pertaining to processes of creative and cinematicexpression as such.

The ‘moment’ that Vishnu found himself within was not an instant thatone could capture and fix all at once in the manner of a snapshot, butrather a temporal horizon in motion that invited the transformation anddisplacement of those who moved along with its vicissitudes. He had saidin the midst of the graveyard shoot that he would often stumble (‘Fuck!’)into an unforeseen situation that would become the milieu of the filmitself. Vishnu’s image of reel time suggests that to make a film is to inhabita time of emergence, and that to live in such a milieu as director is to openoneself to what it might yet become as it is filmed: to move along with theflow of its emergent potential. By thinking with this image of experience,we may therefore find a way of further approaching what I describedearlier in this essay as the historical ontology of cinematic images. ‘Eachone of us… is nothing but an assemblage of three images, a consolidate of

33 Leo Charney, ‘In a moment: film andthe philosophy of modernity’, in Leo

Charney and Vanessa Schwartz

(eds), Cinema and the Invention ofModern Life (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press,

1995), pp. 279–96.

34 Anindita Niyogi Balslev, A Study ofTime in Indian Philosophy (NewDelhi: Munshiram Manoharlal

Publishers, 1999), p. 50.

35 See Lim, Translating Time. Idescribe the cultural life of filmicfragments in the Indian postcolonial

present in my Crooked Stalks:Cultivating Virtue in South India(Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2009).

36 To attribute temporality in Indian

cinema to ‘the cyclical temporal

worldview of Hinduism’ – as doesDavid Martin-Jones in ‘Toward

another “-image”: Deleuze,

narrative time and popular Indian

cinema’, Deleuze Studies, vol. 2,no. 1 (2008), p. 35 – is to generalize

precariously at the level of both

Indian culture and its associated

cinematic forms.



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perception-images, action-images and affection-images’, writes Deleuze,elaborating on a trinity of terms that Bergson put forward to articulate atemporal ontology of matter and image.37 In what follows, I will borrowthese terms – perception, action and affection – to describe three domainsof experience through which directing might be seen to becomeexpressive in its nature: three ways in which time opens as a conduit forthe emergence of the cinematic image. In each case, I begin with an imagefrom Vishnu’s films and then work back towards its conditions ofpossibility, the empirical and temporal circumstances that invest suchimages with expressive form.

Accidental happenings in time are essential to the unfolding of Sarvam/Everything (2009), Vishnu Vardhan’s most recent film. ‘Everything isvery happy, and dabbak! The girl dies’, he explained, describing a pivotalevent halfway through the film that transforms it from a light-heartedromance into a dark and sombre thriller.38 This death is the unexpectedoutcome of a bicycle race between lovers Karthik and Sandhya, playfullywaged with a borrowed pair of children’s bicycles. Looking backward asthey wobble along on these diminutive wheels, the camera presents aseries of quick impressions of their avid and laughing faces; not once doesthe camera look forward along the road from the point of view of theracers themselves. Only we can see what they have failed to notice in theintensity of their chase: a red kite fluttering across the full frame of thescreen, trailing the glass-studded string with which it is caught up on aroadside lamppost.39 The kite registers its actuality with lethal force,whipping around the neck of the heroine to deal a sudden wound she willnot survive. And yet there is also a virtual quality to our cinematicperception of this object, as a series of previously glimpsed elements – thestriped retaining wall along which they race, the lampposts under whichthey pass, and above all the kite itself as it drifts to rest above this road inan earlier scene – leads us to anticipate the kite’s eventual return. Thescene stages a contrast between ordinary perception, limited in its durationand scope, and a more expansive perception made possible throughcinema. We see the emergence in time of an event neither seen norforeseen by its subjects.The scene of the tragic bicycle race was shot over two days on a wide

road fronting Eliot’s Beach in southern Chennai in August 2008(figure 2). The question of anticipation surfaced in discussions betweenVishnu and his cameraman Nirav Shah on the first morning of the shoot:should the actress playing Sandhya lightly kiss Karthik’s cheek and say‘goodbye’ before taking up her cycle, for example, leaving the latter andthe audience to puzzle why? Although no such exchange ultimatelyappears in the film, I was struck by the extent to which Vishnu’s ownperception of the ordinary environment surrounding us had beenovertaken by the virtual horizons of cinematic perception they were in theprocess of staging here. Some of the first shots that morning, for example,

37 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 66; HenriBergson, Matter and Memory(New York, NY: Dover Publications,2004).

38 On the notion of sarvam anityam –

‘all is impermanent’ – in Indian

Buddhism, see Balslev, A Study ofTime in Indian Philosophy, p. xi.

39 In a notoriously dangerous practice,glass-studded strings are used in

kite-fighting competitions in many

Indian cities, with rivals seeking to

cut away the flying kites of others.



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were framed against the high striped wall dividing the road from sand andsea, as the lovers negotiated with a pair of children to borrow the bicyclesfor their ill-fated race. As the crew worked to dismantle a crane and movelights and reflectors between two shots composed beside this wall,I caught a sudden and vivid glimpse of how thoroughly Vishnu had cometo inhabit the world that was being crafted for this scene. The director waslooking at Karthik’s car, parked beside the pair of children’s bicycles.When an assistant carefully carried a piece of equipment past this car,cutting briefly across Vishnu’s field of vision, he provoked a sudden andangry outburst: ‘Come man, to the outside, just standing in the frame[like that]!’ the director exclaimed. The assistant was startled, as wasI. Vishnuwas a genial and playful presence on his sets, and the sudden angerin his voice was a surprising eruption. It was always the case that those whostumble into the visual field of a positioned camera risk the ire of directorand cinematographer, but here no such shot was as yet established on thescene. Vishnu appeared to be seeing something else altogether – the frameof a shot yet in the making – attesting to theways in which the ordinary spanof his perception had been extended by the process of shooting film.

‘The cinematographic character of our knowledge of things is due to thekaleidoscopic character of our adaptation to them’, Bergson wrote. Weordinarily perceive the world through a discontinuous series of snapshotimpressions because our action in the world is itself necessarilydiscontinuous in its nature.40 Perception, that is, may be taken as nothingmore than the virtual action of the body on things, its selective andsubtractive quality indebted to the instrumental orientation of our deeds.41

‘But now and then’, Bergson also observed, ‘men arise whose senses orwhose consciousness are less adherent to life. Nature has forgotten toattach their faculty of perceiving to their faculty of acting.’42 Identifyingthese figures as artists, he argued that the works of their vision showed that‘an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible’.43 The virtualhorizons of their perception, in other words, promised to reveal the realdepth of time in its continuous flux, which we tended otherwise to miss.While Bergson looked to philosophy for a means of extending universallysuch ‘satisfactions which art will never give save to those favoured bynature and fortune’, philosophy itself has since turned towards the cinemafor a creative extension of ordinary perception.44 Such potential cannot beexpressed by the filmic course of cinema without its expression in thesituation of filmmaking.

Fig. 2. Sarvam (Vishnu Vardhan,

2008) kite scene: screenshot, and

actor facing away from cycle-

mounted camera.

40 Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 333.

41 Bergson, Matter and Memory,p. 58.

42 Bergson, Creative Mind, p. 114.

43 Ibid., p. 113.

44 Ibid., p. 106.



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In the Tamil popular film industry of south India, a ‘culture’ of directorsas auteurs emerged alongside the waning dominance of studio productionhouses in the 1970s.45 While film in Tamil and other south Indianlanguages sustains wildly popular and abiding cults around the signaturepersonality of particular stars, senior Tamil directors such asK. Balachander, Bharathiraja and Mani Ratnam are widely recognized byindustry peers, reviewers and critics, and public audiences alike as bearersof distinctive vision and influential style, hailed routinely as kalaibrahmakkal or ‘creator-gods of the arts’.46 This image of the director as acreative artist is supported not only by diverse forms of print andtelevisual media but also by customary practices of film production in theregion. Tamil directors often exercise singular influence over their films,typically composing the stories and screenplays they direct but also attimes wielding the camera, assuming central acting roles, collaborating onmusic and editing, or producing the films. On location they are shieldedfrom the sun by umbrellas, cooled by standing fans and plied withconstant rounds of fruit juice, exotic teas and favoured snacks byproduction assistants, as if to annul the distractions of the body. Assistantdirectors bearing mobile phones, laptops, notepads, cigarettes and otheraccessories are expected to respond instantly to any improvizational urgeson the part of their directors.One may find in all of this further evidence of the forms of hierarchy

that have long been imagined as pernicious and pervasive in Indian sociallife. What I seek to emphasize here, however, is the significance of suchpractices for the experiential texture of the films they yield. The breakfrom the staccato demands of active life effected by the milieu of shootingsustains the modes of virtual perception through which these films aregradually invested with their own capacity to extend the horizons ofordinary perception. I was sometimes reminded forcefully of this myself,as an ethnographer and an intermittent force of perceptual distraction onVishnu’s sets. One day during the shooting of Billa, for example, at a lorryrepair yard in Kuala Lumpur I found Vishnu sitting quietly alone atseveral points during the complicated shoot. When I tried to turn one ofthese instances of apparent relaxation into an occasion for a question,Vishnu gently warded me off. ‘Not now’, he said, pointing to his ownhead to explain. ‘I’m letting it wander.’I would come to learn that what Vishnu saw in such moments was the

narrative flow of an incipient film that slowly coalesced through theaccumulation of isolated shots. ‘The film is running through me’, he said,describing how Sarvam had seized his imagination even while he wasworking on Billa. ‘I have been living with it for two years.’ But moresubtly as well, this image of a moving film gestures towards the temporaldepth of the cinematic frame itself, as it is imagined, perceived andrealized in the midst of a shoot. Certainly, framing was an act of selectiveperception in support of action. ‘I am looking only at what is in the frame’,Vishnu said one afternoon, explaining how he filtered out the bustle andchaos of those working around him on a shoot. And yet I came to see that

45 On auteurity as a cultural formation,

see James Naremore, ‘Auteurship’,

in TobyMiller (ed.), ACompanion toFilm Theory (London: Blackwell,1999).

46 For an account of contemporary film

culture in the south Indian city of

Chennai, see Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Filmculture in Chennai’, Film Quarterlyvol. 62, no. 1 (2008), pp. 40–45.



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this moment of which he spoke extended far beyond its instantaneousactualization in the bodies, tools and location working to make it present.

We were chatting that afternoon on the balcony of his hotel room highin the south Indian hills of Munnar, the day before another shootingschedule for Sarvam was due to start. Vishnu gestured with his handstowards a stand of tall eucalyptus trees rising before us, cutting verticallythrough the sight of a hillside covered with tea estates and low buildings inthe distance. ‘When you look here, I almost see this frame like this. Withjust this half branch inside, this is the full thing, and just a little on the rightedge of the frame. Now this is the frame for me. It’s like that. That’s how itis.’ His language that day underscored the static fixity of the framethrough which he saw this quotidian landscape, as if it were thephotographic record of an instant. But when he spoke of similar matters inthe midst of an ongoing shoot, the contours of the frame were far moreelusive. Working from shot to shot, he suggested on another occasion –

during a break in the shooting of a song sequence for Sarvam – he hadcome to anticipate and even perceive those that would eventually followbeyond successive cuts. ‘In one frame you actually see another frame…another frame of the same thing, another perspective of the same thing.’This was a matter not only of how these shots appeared on location, andhow they would look as an edited course of film, but also how they wouldappear on a movie hall projection screen. ‘That’s what is in your head.’ Tolive with a film in the midst of its fashioning was to perceive, even in thispresent of discontinuous takes, the virtual horizons of a whole world.‘It becomes like a habit, actually.’

Like the potential frame that he alone had seen at Eliot’s Beach, thisvisceral embodiment of a more creative perceptual faculty was moreclearly evident in what Vishnu did than in what he said. On location forSarvam, he would enact its scenes each day with his own body, workingout, take by take, the movements that he envisioned for his actors. Andpacing about restlessly as equipment was shifted and rearranged betweensuccessive shots, Vishnu would often stop to crouch and compose his ownbody in the manner of an imagined camera, framing a potential visualfield through the stasis and movement of his own arms and hands(figure 3).47 Did such gestures represent a subjective and personalappropriation of cinematic vision, or the loss of oneself to a ‘cine-eye’lodged within the impersonal substance of matter itself?48 With Vishnu,I saw that these gestures were exploratory rather than imperative incharacter, often sustaining questions posed to the viewpoint of others –‘See if this would look good?’ – rather than the authority of his ownsingular vision. They may be taken, that is, to prepare a field of actionwhose potential movements extended far beyond the person of thedirector. With this observation in mind, Let us turn to the forms oftemporal openness at play in directed action.

47 On such gestures as modes of

coordinating action, see Emmanuel

Grimaud, ‘The film in hand: modes

of coordination and assistedvirtuosity in the Bombay film

studios’, Qualitative SociologyReview, vol. 3, no. 3 (2007).

48 On Dziga Vertov’s ‘eye of matter’,see Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 81.



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Vishnu Vardhan’s 2007 Billa was a gangster film that remade animmensely popular 1980 Tamil film of the same title, directed byR. Krishnamurthy. The starring hero in each of these films plays a doublerole: first the glamorous and cosmopolitan gangster David Billa, and thenthe ordinary local man who is hired and trained by the police toimpersonate the don and infiltrate his gang when, unbeknownst to itsmembers, Billa dies. The plot fits the ‘situation – action – modifiedsituation’ scheme that Deleuze offers as a formula for the movement of the‘action-image’ in cinema: in Vishnu’s film, petty pickpocket Velu findshimself thrown into the milieu of an encompassing situation, that of thegangsters, where he must ‘raise his mode of being to the demands of themilieu’ so that he may overturn it altogether.49 Stylized scenes ofpreparatory target practice and physical training foreshadow the ‘possibleaction’ he will exercise. However, Velu first infiltrates Billa’s gang in amuch more subtle manner, slipping along an audiovisual current into anuninterrupted flow of action and imagination. The film shifts smoothlyinto the third of its song sequences soon after Velu appears in Billa’s garb.The gangster’s former lover addresses Velu and the camera with ardentgestures of passion, the spectacular quality of the scene conveyed by whitesands and blue waters, teams of breakdancers disappearing into wisps ofsmoke, and the image of Velu himself on a leather couch on the beach,sunglasses hiding his reaction to the spectacle. Action slips into dream:Velu need only watch coolly as the world he has entered moves as a‘wave’ around him.50

We find here a temporary suspension of possible action, the flow of thesong maintaining the pure virtuality and openness of a world’s activity.The narrative movement of the film expresses a tension that Bergson hadsketched between two ways of conceiving action in time: ‘The durationwherein we see ourselves acting, and in which it is useful that we shouldsee ourselves, is a duration whose elements are dissociated andjuxtaposed. The duration wherein we act is a duration wherein our statesmelt into each other.’51 For Bergson, the first of these modes of actioncorresponded to the discontinuous operation of the cinematographicapparatus, while the second expressed more directly the durative flow oftime. In the film Billa, however, we find both of these modes at worksimultaneously: we see Velu acting as a possible Billa by matching himup against a series of images of what the don would do; and we findVelu in the film becoming Billa by slipping into the flow of the world of

Fig. 3.Sarvam: Camera facingactor,

and the director ‘becoming camera’

in virtual perception.

49 Ibid., p. 141.


51 Bergson, Matter andMemory, pp. 243–4.



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his life. In Deleuze’s language, we have here a hybrid cinematic form,alternating and even confounding the distinction between movement-image and time-image.52 What is interesting about this form is the imageof action it puts forward: activity as inactivity, as a suspension of agencyin a continuous course of transformation. More importantly, when we turnto Vishnu as director of this film, we find no better image to express theparadoxical mode of his own action.

On location with Vishnu, I found that a dynamic relationship betweenthese two modes – between the virtual action of a world and the possibleaction of those within it – was essential not only to the images at work inhis films, but also to the way in which they were fashioned, shaping whatcould be captured when the director himself would call for ‘action’ at theoutset of each take. The song sequence that stages Velu’s return as Billa,for example, cuts to three brief shots panning across a white suspensionbridge from far below, coming to rest on Velu’s assured face and theconfident poise with which his arms grasp the steel railing. I was with thecrew as these shots were taken one afternoon at the Malaysian nationaladministrative complex of Putrajaya (figure 4). Riding here with thedirector and cinematographer Nirav Shah, I asked why they had chosenthis location. ‘Very simple: it looks good’, Vishnu said, to which Niravadded: ‘If you want to intellectualize it, it’s the seat of power: Billa shouldbe here’. Nirav smiled broadly as he said this, and Vishnu, delighted withthe thought, held out his hand for a low-five.

Although these comments could be taken as a forecast of possible andintended action, I encountered the limits of their power as the shoot itselfunfolded. The specific spot below the bridge from which these and severalother shots were taken, for example, was found only by accident thatafternoon as Vishnu took a quick walk with his assistant director Gokul,scouting locations for another montage sequence for the film: ‘When Iwent there I was walking. Something told me…“OK”, I said, “I’ll justtake a walk”. I walked out, I saw something strike. I walked down, I don’tknow how I went there, I just went down, I said “Fuck!” Suddenly, thereyou go, “Holy shit, look at this! It can happen here.” We move in there.’Shifting register from the playful declaration of intentions that he andNirav had made earlier, Vishnu spoke of this moment as though thispossibility for action had erupted from the place itself. He was, I found,deeply open to such encounters with an active world. Time and again,

Fig. 4.Billa bridge shot: screenshot,

and the director/crew shooting on

location.

52 On such hybrid forms, see Deleuze,Cinema 2, p. 270, and DavidMartin-

Jones, Deleuze, Cinema andNational Identity (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 2006).



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Vishnu returned to one expression to make sense of this manner of workand life: ‘Go with the flow’.We spoke more about this phrase beside another bridge that night,

waiting for the lighting crew to set up equipment for a night chasesequence. ‘Gowith the flow of your thinking process’, he explained: ‘Youthought of something. You can shoot it. Do it.’ At first I took him to betalking about an imagined act that somehow had to be actualized in theenvironment of the shoot, and I asked how he would reconcile this flow ofhis thought with the flow of filmmaking circumstance. But Vishnuresisted the dualism of my question, insisting that there was only a singlecontinuous flow of thought, action and reaction at stake here: ‘When youcome there, the whole place is giving you another idea altogether. Youdon’t cut that flow.’ I found his language fascinating, not only in itsapparent defiance of the piecemeal fashion in which he was elicitingaction himself here – ‘Don’t cut…Don’t stop’ – but also in itsembodiment of the very current he was describing: ‘My whole flow is…like a stream, you just go, you just go with it, you know. You just go withthe flow. Either you flow with the location, or you flow with the nature, oryou let everything blend together and you just… It’s like a gushing thing,it’s not like a planned thing, no, you just gush along, you just go.’ Whatwas at stake in avidly expressing a mode of acting with the world soantithetical to the image of the director as an orchestrator of possibleaction on the world?The familiar English cliche that Vishnu could not avoid expressing may

perhaps be indebted to the popularization of East Asian Zen and Taoistphilosophy among diverse western-educated, English-speaking peoples inthe 1960s. Consider, for example, the ‘temporal flow’ of the tea ceremonyin Japanese Buddhism, in which ‘each act wholly fills the present, yetmust at the same time dissolve and give way to the next’.53 I do not wish,however, to characterize this orientation as an outgrowth of a specificallyAsian or Indian philosophy, but instead more simply as a way of relatingoneself to the emergent potential of time. Bergson calls this orientation‘intuition’: a mode of action – a ‘laborious, even painful, effort’ – throughwhich thought might bend itself towards the continuous flux of indefinitestates that he associated with durative time.54 Bergson’s interest in ‘supple,mobile, and almost fluid representations, always ready to mouldthemselves on the fleeting forms of intuition’ bears a striking resemblanceto way in which Vishnu sought as a filmmaker to relate himself to theworld in which he was working: ‘No matter whatever happens, no matterif everything goes wrong, you make sure that nothing stops’. Here was apractice of directing aimed not at mastering the situation to suit one’sintended action, but instead towards finding a means of expression withinthe flow of its social, technical and natural contingencies.Directing on location always brings into play a diverse field of

unpredictable circumstances: the vagaries of weather, crowds and permits inoutdoor locations; the challenges of coordinating and sustaining disparatebodies of creative, technical and support staff; the essential unpredictability

53 Dennis Hirota, The Wind in thePines: Classic Writings of the Wayof Tea as a Buddhist Path (Fremont,CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1995),p. 25. I am grateful to Charlie

Hallisey for this reference.

54 Henri Bergson, An Introduction toMetaphysics (New York, NY:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 32.



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of the equipment itself. Like many other Indian directors, Vishnu engagedwith these circumstances through a cultivated openness to their temporalflux. Take, for example, the way in which a situation was established for theshooting of one crucial scene in Billa: the staging by police of a fictitiousarms deal, whose collapse would open the chase sequence in which thegangstermeets his death.Although thedirector had envisioned and requesteda vast factory space for the enactment of this scene, a series of verbalmisunderstandings led the film’s Malaysian location managers to scout andreserve a technically impossible space for the shoot. A fierce quarrel ensued,but Vishnu ultimately consented to the producer’s wish to use instead a locallorry repair yard that hadbeenoffered for free by itsMalaysianTamil owners.‘That’s my job – to make it look good’, he resolved, and spent the nightreimagining the scene with his assistant directors.

The shoot itself, a few days later, was complicated and carried on wellbeyond sunset. ‘I’m fighting with this bugger all day’, Vishnucomplained, referring to the sun, the struggle arising to a great degreefrom the limitations of budget and the need to do as much as possible withthe available light. The most elaborate aspect of the scene involved anopaque glass panel through which Billa would burst in a hidden car,scattering a phalanx of startled police officers. Here too was a problem, asone of the police officers mistook his cue, leaping away in surprise a fullsecond before the exploding glass was supposed to have alarmed him.Because the production could afford no more than one of these elaboratesetups, however, the director substituted a series of wide, mid and closeshots for the single shot with which he had hoped to capture the eruptionof the car and its aftermath. ‘I could have made it a Bond film’, Vishnusaid wistfully at the end of that day, reflecting on the financial limits of the‘south Indian regional cinema’ within which he worked. Nevertheless, itseemed to me that the creative potential of the action he staged aroseprecisely from such open-ended engagements with situations amenable tolittle control. There was something akin to a formula for the way thatVishnu faced these circumstances: ‘What is the best I can do now? Thatwill be running always in the mind.’

The temporal index borne by this continuous question to oneself – now –

is crucial to my argument here. For Vishnu, as for many Indian directors,working on location was far from a matter of simply giving form to theexisting intentions and ideas that one has. The situation established by thelocation within which Vishnu directed cannot be understood, therefore, inspatial terms alone; there was a temporal dimension essential to itsopenness. To ‘go with the flow’ – that is, to acknowledge and allow thevirtual action of things upon oneself – is to submit to the unexpected forces,elements and arrangements that time may introduce at any instant. It is torecognize that one is always subject to time: if not in the contingency of anactive present, then in the insistence of a memory – ‘Ayyoo, I should havedone that, no…’– that would seek always to return towhat could have beendone in a situation long since lost.



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For Vishnu, this deference to the time in which action unfolds wasessential to the experience of its creativity. Speaking of the shots fromunder the bridge, for example, he reflected: ‘It’s that moment, you know.If I thought “That is where I am going to shoot”, if I had stood there [onthe bridge], I wouldn’t have got what I got there [below the bridge].Understand? I definitely wouldn’t have got what I got there.’ In inhabitingthis moment of emergence, Vishnu sought to allow himself to be movedor displaced by what erupted within it. This was an ethos reflecting both atemporal relation to the place in which one worked, and a temporalrelation to one’s own potential for expression. ‘I feel happy when I amshooting it. That’s all that matters’, Vishnu said. Let us call this lattermode of relating to oneself a matter of ‘affection’. It is this domain thatmust be further explored to grasp the temporal articulation of perceptionand action in the creative practice of filmmaking.

Sarvam cuts directly from the scene of Sandhya’s accident to the image ofher bloodied body being rushed by stretcher along a narrow hospitalcorridor, Karthik leaning over to assure her that she ‘will be fine’ as she iscarried beyond a pair of glass doors. But looking back through thesedoors shortly afterwards, he senses that this may not be the case, as hesees a couple crumpling in grief in the distance. Everyone around him alsobegins to weep loudly when the doctor comes out to share the news, but healone remains strangely composed and volubly meditative. Apparentlyunfeeling, Karthik is caught in a spiral of time. ‘Just now daa’, he tellshis friendKrishna, ‘a littlewhile before, shewas laughing happily and ridinga cycle. That laughing face is still there, just like that before my eyes.’Each timeKarthik looks downoraway fromhis friend as he paces around thehospital waiting area, he turns back again to give voice to a slightlydifferent recollection: that such a tiny string had caught around her neck…that itwas coatedwith glass… that she had sped aheadon the larger cycle…that the pair crying in the distance must be her parents… that someonemustsign for her body… that it cannot be him as they are not yet married.Krishna finally pulls Karthik away as he keeps talking, mostly to himself,and it is only when he leans his head against a long white wall that wesee and hear him break down in tears. This feeling of grief erupts almost as asurprise; as though to feel it Karthik must be reminded of what ishappening at that very moment; as though it could be felt only throughthe return of time to itself.It is not easy to grasp what Bergson might have meant by suggesting

that we may ‘place ourselves… in the concrete flow of duration’.55 Hesought, after all, to contest the many ways in which we tend to spatializetime, to treat it as an empty interval within which thought and action takesplace. What then does it mean to find oneself in a duration such as this:

Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs thepast into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinctform the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more probably,

55 Ibid., p. 36.



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showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavierload we drag behind us as we grow older.56

We relate to ourselves, Bergson seems to suggest, through the relation oftime to itself: past to present, present to past, quality to successive quality.Duration appears here, in other words, as a reflexive relation, anopen-ended and transformative relation of something to itself. Anothername that Bergson proposes for this kind of reflexive relationship is‘affection’: the action of a body upon itself.57 What we find in duration istime split against itself, acting upon itself, affecting and being affected byitself; to say that we are in time is perhaps to imply more profoundly thatwe are time, that our freedom to act otherwise amounts only to thedifference that time makes to itself.58

This affectivity of time is something that cinema can show us, Deleuzeargues: ‘how we inhabit time, how we move in it, in this form whichcarries us away, picks us up and enlarges us’.59 But again we may askwhether it can do so without its makers being affected themselves by thetime in which they work. Take, for example, the shooting of this hospitalscene from Sarvam. Vishnu and cinematographer Nirav speculated that itwould be the most intense scene in the film. ‘They should cry’, I heardNirav saying confidently to Vishnu as they flicked through digital stills ofthe completed scene two days after they had shot it. At the outset of theshoot, however, quite what the scene might make anyone feel remainedunclear. Like the spiraling course of Karthik’s grief within the film, theaffective power of the scene would only develop through a recursiveencounter with its own unfolding.

On the first morning of the shoot, Vishnu walked me through thehospital corridors constructed by his art director on the ninth floor of anunfinished Chennai office block, the narrow passages in blinding whitedesigned to convey the anxiety with which Karthik would rush Sandhyainto the operating room. As the shoot proceeded, the director demandedfeeling more than anything else from his actors. ‘Let me feel it now!’, heyelled, as the trolley raced through the narrow hallway for the first takerehearsal, camera mounted backwards to frame the hero’s panicked face.‘Come on! Mood, mood!’, he would exclaim if the cinematographerfound such feeling lacking from the standpoint of his camera lens.Accidents erupting in the midst of takes throughout the day – a glass doorcracked by an errant nurse, a open doorway exposing set equipment to theframe, pieces of the stretcher-mounted camera falling away as the cart wasraced along the halls, and above all emotional misfires on the part of theactors themselves – underscored the essential contingency of theenterprise. ‘We don’t even know what is going to happen…we don’teven know how it will look’, Vishnu had told me that morning, just beforethey began to rehearse the first take. But crucially, he forecast as well thatif he ‘felt it’ in the shots taken that day, this would come as a kind of dejavu: ‘when you see it, that is a feeling of watching something which you’veseen inside’. A successful scene, in other words, would echo or revive

56 Ibid., p. 26–27.

57 Bergson, Matter and Memory,p. 310


59 Ibid., p. 82.



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something that the director – like his cinematic character – had already feltbefore.Affection is essential to Indian popular cinema, which expresses and

provokes felt intensities to seize and absorb the attention of its audience.60

This glimpse of the cinematic conjuring of one such scene, however,reveals affection as an open and indeterminate horizon of expression in thepresent that nevertheless relies for its force upon some semblance of thepast. Although this might appear to represent a contradiction, Bergson’swork on time suggests that this apparent impasse depends upon the basic,and erroneous, presumption that the past must precede the present.Anomalous states of consciousness such as deja vu, Bergson argues, attestinstead to the simultaneous coexistence of past and present: ‘It is arecollection of the present moment in that actual moment itself. It is of thepast in its form and of the present in its matter. It is a memory of thepresent.’61 His explication of this argument puts forward an image of timeitself as twofold in nature, composed in the manner of a pair of ‘jets’: ‘oneof which falls back towards the past whilst the other springs forwardtowards the future’.62 This image offers another way of articulating theessential creativity of temporal duration: each perception of an actualpresent, selective and prospective in its identification of fixed objects,coincides with a virtual memory of itself as emerging from the flow oftime.63 Sensations of doubled consciousness such as deja vu makeperceptible what is always invisibly the case.What is palpably ‘felt’ in such sensations, in other words, is the

affective intensity of a spiraling relation between the actual and the virtual,between the present and the living pasts that make it otherwise. ‘Whenyou see it, that is a feeling of watching something which you’ve seeninside’, Vishnu reflected. ‘Feeling it’, for Vishnu, is a matter of affectivedisplacement in time: the sense that one’s own feelings are returning topresence in some other time and from somewhere else, an encounter withthe virtual horizons of the film as they came to surface ‘out really inreality’. It is essential to note that this return from elsewhere is effectedboth by the milieu of its making and by the screen on which it registers(figure 5). Vishnu insisted that seeing the hospital space constructed byhis art director that day, for example, was not in itself sufficient for theessential feeling of deja vu: he was only affected by the eventualappearance of the scene within the frame of a screen.64 ‘It’s like I amwatching a film. The monitor is like watching a film’, he said, describing

Fig. 5. Sarvam hospital scene:

screenshot, and director viewing

the live video feed.

60 See Anand Pandian, ‘Landscapes of

affective expression: affectiveencounters in South Indian cinema’,

Cinema Journal, forthcoming 2011.

61 Henri Bergson, ‘Memory of the

present and false recognition’, inMind-Energy: Lectures and Essays(New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1920),

p. 167.

62 Ibid., p. 60.

63 Keith Ansell-Pearson, ‘The reality of

the virtual: Bergson and Deleuze’,

MLN, vol. 120, no. 5 (2005).

64 On the constitutive passivity of the

Deleuzian spectator, see RichardRushton, ‘Deleuzian spectatorship’,

Screen, vol. 50, no. 1 (2009), p. 48.



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his experience of the video feed through which the scene would first gaina form independent from him as an actual frame. Throughout the shoot,Vishnu’s eyes were glued almost exclusively to this small screen as theaction unfolded immediately around him. ‘Wild, huh?’, he asked me as wewatched together an establishing shot for the entire scene framed without ahitch late that afternoon. Its affective power returned to him in the form ofa surprise: ‘I felt it in the first take itself’.

These feelings, always anticipated and sometimes attained, cannot betaken, therefore, as a simple external expression or realization of oneselfas director, routed and refracted as they were through a complex andunpredictable apparatus of enactment. There was an essentialindeterminacy to the time opened by this play of affections, anuncertainty that no amount of intentional planning and staging couldovercome. Vishnu reflected: ‘If it is the same dialogue, with the sameemotion, with the same way he is doing, everything is the same, then itshould work. But sometimes, it won’t work. You won’t know,something is wrong but you won’t… you can’t understand what iswrong. That always happens. “It’s ok, but something is… let’s do onemore”.’ To exercise directorial judgment as a matter of affection is tosubmit to the contingency of time, to rely upon the temporal duration ofpractice for the actual emergence of something new. Each take may thusbe understood as a certain kind of gamble with time, wagering thepotential affective response of an eventual audience. This outcomecannot be understood or expected but only intuited, by following theplay of one’s own affections as they engage what appears onscreen. Forthe filmmaker, just as for those who confront what they have fashioned,‘a time is revealed inside the event’.65 And like the cinema, ethnographypromises us a means of its perception.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystére Picasso/The Picasso Mystery (1956)presents a compelling cinematic scene of artistic creation, unfoldinglargely as a series of anonymous lines that extend along the surface of thescreen without forecasting where they are going. André Bazin suggestedthat the film attested to the continuous life of duration: ‘Each of Picasso’sstrokes is a creation that leads to further creation’, he writes, ‘not as a causeleads to an effect, but as one living thing engenders another’. Confrontedby the ‘pure waiting and uncertainty’ with which Clouzot’s work presentsus, we are led to conclude that ‘only film could make us see durationitself’.66 Seen in retrospect, however, some of the most telling moments inthe film are instances of discontinuity, such as the moment that ariseswhen Picasso has finished one work and suggests making another, evenwhile Clouzot tells him that he has no more than five minutes of film stockleft to shoot with. Their exchange is captured by a different camera thanthe one that has guided our looking thus far: suddenly the menthemselves, rather than the emergent strokes and works, are picturedonscreen, and they speak too of the hiatus. What will Picasso do with this


66 André Bazin, ‘A Bergsonian film:

The Picasso Mystery ’, trans. BertCardullo, Journal of AestheticEducation, vol. 35, no. 2(2001), pp. 2, 4.



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small interval of available reel time? ‘Wewill see, it will be a surprise’, hepromises, while Clouzot retorts with a threatened interruption of his own:‘Just remember. If anything at all happens, you stop, and I’ll stop.’ Whatfollows is a series of cuts back and forth between painter, canvas, director,camera and footage counter, the pace and direction differing sharply fromthe openness through which Picasso’s works otherwise gain formonscreen. It is as though the film cannot capture the continuity of its ownhappening in time.It is precisely this limit – the point at which happening in film stumbles

over the happening of film – that I have sought to engage by workingethnographically in the space and time of cinematic production. I havetracked back and forth here between emergent scenes of becoming in apair of popular Indian films and the emergent situations from which theyarise. The notion of ‘reel time’ that has oriented these scenes andsituations calls our attention to the durative horizon of creative expressionthrough which film gains its capacity – as Bazin has it – to reveal durationitself. We may therefore find a way here of grappling with a temporalconundrum that has haunted cinema almost since its inception in the earlytwentieth century: rolling film’s staccato presentation of an onlyapparently continuous reality. ‘Real time’ in cinema can only be illusory,many critics have insisted.67 We may find, however, that this is the caseonly insofar as one begins one’s critical work with the ‘mummified’ bodyof film rather than the living process of its ‘embalmment’. From thestandpoint of this process, film loses the clarity of its form as a fixed reelof discontinuous images, coming to appear instead as a ‘way station’ inthe flux of being: a temporary point of affective resonance between thebeing of a maker, that of a milieu of filmmaking, and that of a filmviewer.68 Zeno’s paradox, at least in respect to cinema, finds a means ofresolution here.It is as an ethnographer that I have tried to convey the temporal texture

of such experience; I too have sought fleeting resonance in time with aflux of circumstance other than my own. The disposition to time at workin this essay is therefore rather different from the orientation of certainother recent calls for more production ethnography. ‘In screen productioncultures’, John Caldwell writes, for example, ‘human behaviours andpersonal disclosures are systematically choreographed and preemptivelystaged for public analysis.’69 The difference in our respective conclusionsmay express differences of empirical setting, conceptual predilection ormodes of ethnographic attention. In any case, it is the sense that nothinghappens in a time of encounter – be that the encounter of filmmaker withprofilmic world, or the encounter of ethnographer with a world offilmmaking – that I have sought to counter here. Through these glimpsesof one director becoming otherwise – becoming character, becomingcamera, becoming image, becoming world – we may glimpse how thepresent may be lived as a creative horizon of emergence. And as films andfilmmakers alike gain unanticipated forms, the historical ontology of thecinematic image resurfaces as a historical ontology of the contemporary

67 On the ‘allure… of a mobility that

is, in film, quite simply not there’,

see Doane, The Emergence ofCinematic Time, p. 205.

68 On ‘way stations’ along an

unfolding line of continuouspassage, see Tim Ingold, Lines: aBrief History (London: Routledge,2007).

69 John Caldwell, ‘Screen studies and

industrial “theorizing”’, Screen, vol.50, no. 1 (2009), pp. 167–79.



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self. Examining the making of cinema, we ultimately confront thecinematic nature of the present as an ethical question: how best to live in aworld become film?70 In attending to this time as a horizon of creativeperception, action, or affection, we may come to appreciate further notonly the cultural conditions of contemporary life, but also the arts ofexistence best suited to bending them.

Research for this essay was conducted between 2007 and 2010 with the support of the American Institute of Indian Studies, Johns

Hopkins University, the National Science Foundation, the University of British Columbia Hampton Fund and the Wenner-Gren

Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am indebted to the openness and goodwill of Vishnu Vardhan his collaborators and

associates.

70 On the metacinematic quality of

contemporary life and its ethicalhorizons in rural south India, see my

‘Cinema in the countryside: Tamil

cinema and the remaking of rural

life’, in Velayutham (ed.), TamilCinema, pp. 124–38. On cinemaand a ‘livable’ world, see Marrati,

Gilles Deleuze, pp. 78–93.



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reel time: ethnography and the historical ontology...

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